People : Author : Rose Pesotta Tags

Rose Pesotta
Bread upon the Waters
CHAPTER 13
Last Outpost of Civilization
FROM THE TROPICS to the Northwest÷fromPuerto Rico to the State of Washington.... Late in December, 1934, I wason my way to Seattle at President Dubinsky's request. The Internationalhad chartered a dressmakers' local there, and it needed building up. Crossingthe continent, I had the odd experience of meeting all four seasons ofthe year in the course of a single week.
Enroute I visited Los Angeles, where the dressmakers had elected a newexecutive board, which I was called upon to install. The rival union hadbeen liquidated some lime before. I was proud to note how well our membershiphad carried out the program we had charted following the hard fought generalstrike in 1933.
In San Francisco the two locals had formed a joint board managed bySamuel S. White. The dressmakers were headed by Jennie Matyas, appointedas an organizer there by President Dubinsky. For years a resident there,she had lived as a girl in New York, where she had helped Waist Makers'Local 25 make history.
January 2 and 3 found me moving northward, feasting my eyes on a fascinatingpanorama÷gigantic redwood trees, white-topped Mount Shasta, the CascadeMountains. Great stretches of open land were dotted with snow-capped stumpswhich had the look of giant mushrooms. On either side of the train, roadsglistened like pictures of fairyland in a child's book.
A committee headed by Clifford Mayer, Manly Labby, and Sam Schatz ofLocal 70, met me in the Portland station. The same evening I spoke at acloakmakers' meeting. It was stirring to see these girls absorbed in seriousunion matters and arguing intelligently about them. A year earlier theyhad known nothing about unionism and were working for miserable wages.Now they had laid a solid foundation for a real union. Arriving in SeattleSaturday noon, I registered at the YWCA and believing I would stay herefor some time, went hunting for an apartment. I was fortunate in findinga clean, well furnished place in the Spring Apartments, in the heart ofthe business section, a few blocks from the Labor Temple.
Unpacking my things in this new home, I turned on the radio and satdown in front of a bay window facing magnificent Mount Rainier, toppedwith snow the year round! Rain was falling, the sort the Scotch call a"drizzle-drazzle," but which people in the Puget Sound countryspeak of as "Oregon mist." I contemplated the mountain as ifthrough a veil of gauze.
The air was chill, and a great loneliness pressed down upon me. I askedmyself: "What am I doing here alone? What is in store for me?"I got out of that shadow by phoning two trusted members of the Cloakmakers'Union, Meyer Rosenberg and Leon Glazer. At the Glazer home, we discussedthe problem of putting the new dressmakers' local on its feet.
Meyer Rosenberg, father of four grown children, and a pioneer in ourunion, had come from Toledo, Ohio. An active member of the Democratic party,he took me to several important affairs, one being the annual Jackson Daydinner, in the Olympic Hotel. The guest speaker was candid about the party'spatron saint, dwelling upon both his virtues and weaknesses. Rosenbergalso took me to meet Warren G. Magnuson, the youthful, athletic DistrictAttorney, since elected to Congress.
Leon Glazer and his son Eugene both worked as pressers, Eugene servingas secretary of the local. Always ready to do things for the organization,unfortunately he could not make the proper approach to the dressmakers.For this a woman clearly was needed.
Another telephone call brought four cheerful guests for breakfast onSunday. Ross Brown, whom I had known in the East, brought his fiancee,and a tall young man from California, R. P. Beverstock, and his wife, Genevieve.Ross had attended Commonwealth Labor College in Arkansas, and was now withthe Masters, Mates, and Pilots' Union. Beverstock, "Bev" to us,was a Stanford University graduate, and Seattle representative of the PacificCoast Labor Bureau.
After breakfast we went sightseeing in Ross Brown's car. He took usto see the Skid Road, as Yesler Way is called, because in pioneer dayslogs drawn by oxen were skidded down this long sloping road to the firstsawmill, owned by Henry Yesler. The foot of that thoroughfare, however,had a different connotation in labor circles. Here was the "slavemarket," where migrant workers sought jobs in employment offices alltoo often conducted by human sharks. Colman Dock also had special meaning.From it crowded steamers had pushed off for Alaska in the Klondike goldrush of 1897. Close by were the sites of the first cabins in Seattle.
Near the waterfront the atmosphere was dingy. But the prospect improvedas we rode through the business center and into the residential sections.Seattle unquestionably has charm. It is a modern metropolis, which hasmanaged to preserve a great deal of natural scenic beauty. A city of hillsand terraces, where many homes seem to hang precariously, surrounded byluscious fruits and flowers. Roses, blooming all year round, are so largeand perfect that at times they give the impression of being artificial.
Cloakmakers' Local 28 in Seattle had been functioning ever since itwas chartered in 1912. ILGWU representatives visited the Pacific Northwestperiodically, and the local membership kept in frequent touch with thegeneral office.
The Seattle dressmakers, all women, who made house and cotton dresseschiefly, numbered about a thousand. After my visit the previous spring,a group of these women decided to establish a union of their own, and appliedto the International for a charter. A local, No. 184, was set up. Withoutcompetent guidance, however, its charter members had made practically noprogress with organization.
In October, President Dubinsky had stopped in Seattle on his way homefrom the A F of L convention in San Francisco. A committee representingthe dressmakers, cloakmakers, and the Central Labor Council conferred withhim and asked that I be sent to direct the upbuilding of the new local.
Now that I was on the fob Glazer and Rosenberg suggested a room at theLabor Temple, as our organizing center. No office space was available inthe Temple, but the secretary offered to let us use the ante-room to thelarge assembly hall on the fourth floor, with the proviso that delegatesto the Central Labor Council sessions could continue to pass through thatroom.
Designed for coat-checking, this was small, dark, and depressing. Adoor equipped with a peep-hole opened into the assembly hall. At once Iproceeded to clean up and beautify our new office. I made curtains forthe window, bought potted ferns, improved the lighting with modern electricfixtures, acquired a typewriter and mimeograph, and wired to New York forposters and literature. From the basement some one brought an ancient rolltopdesk and a swivel chair, lent to the newly formed union "for the duration."Quickly a drab interior was made over into comfortable and inviting quarters.
Several evenings later I sat in a corner watching the CLC delegatescome in. Largely men who did hard manual labor, they included teamsters,longshoremen, marine workers, loggers, brewery workers, butchers, bakers,and machinists. Most of them naturally expected to find nothing in theroom but the customary hooks on which to hang their coats. One man tookoff his coat while speaking to another and moved toward his usual parkingspot. Instead of bare hooks, he found the wall covered with eye-arrestinglabor posters. Open mouthed with surprise but evidently pleased, he movedabout the room, examining the other walls, stumbling over me, but too absorbedto remember to excuse himself.
Introduced to the assembled delegates as the new organizer for "theLady Garment Workers," I was warmly welcomed into organized labor'sofficial family in Seattle, with the Council pleading its full supportto our cause.
Of necessity this campaign moved slowly at the beginning, for the newlocal had no active members. The courageous girls who applied for the charterhad been gradually eased out of their jobs; most of the others were reluctantto join. Frequently they gave us this answer:
"Why should I risk my job to join your union? The NRA is protectingme."
Many of the dressmakers here were of types not to be found in a NewYork garment shop, except perhaps as buyers models. designers÷or scrub-women.Not a few drove their own cars; some wore expensive fur coats, bought notwith money earned in the factories, but from returns on inherited realestate, dividends on investments, or income from private dressmaking doneat home evenings and Sundays. But others had had a constant struggle withpoverty, had been on welfare or the WPA, and were in mortal fear of losingtheir jobs.
A large percentage of these people were children and grandchildren ofadventurous Americans who had come overland from the East in "prairieschooners"÷covered wagons. They included numerous Scandinavian immigrantsor one generation removed, the latter mainly Minnesota-born, plus a sprinklingof Irish, Icelanders, French Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders.
When we began our Seattle campaign there were strong prejudices againstunions among women garment makers, but of a type different from those Iusually ran into. Unions in that rough and ready country were reminiscent,both in organization and administration, of pioneer days. They were nothingnew in the Northwest, but they had been organized by men for men only.Union halls generally reeked with tobacco smoke, like saloons. Union meetingsfrequently ended in free-for-all fights, in which heads were bashed andnoses broken. Grudges and arguments were settled in the same violent way.So a union hall, in the opinion of most of the women I met, was "scarcelythe proper place for a lady."
Since the NRA had established the Dress Code of Fair Competition, witha minimum wage, they felt that they were protected by the federal government.They had no knowledge of the part union action had played in bringing thatCode into being.
Yet there were good reasons for their joining a union. Most of themwere being mercilessly exploited. The NRA minimum of $13 a week for 40hours' work on cotton garments, was low enough, but even on this the employersfrequently chiseled, using subterfuges to get around the law, and payingthe same wages for higher priced silk and wool dresses.
Frontier habits and attitudes still prevailed widely among the inhabitantsof Seattle. A large percentage of the men did heavy labor÷as loggers, orin the sawmills; as longshoremen; as seamen on ships plying to Alaska,the Orient, or to Southern and Eastern ports; or as fishermen, who madeperiodic two-week trips to waters near Ketchikan, Alaska. There were afew whalers, too, who hunted Moby Dick in high-powered boats, with harpoonsshot from small cannon.
In 1851, with the Civil War still ten years distant, 24 men, women,and children who for months had traveled westward, drawn by slowmovingox-teams, arrived on the Eastern shore of Puget Sound, the last frontier.
Indians headed by their chief, Seattle, welcomed them. When the clusterof log-huts had grown a little, the men who built them named their villagefor the friendly chief.
Migrants had founded this city, and in 1935 the great bulk of its 375,000residents were still from other places. Curiously enough, as soon as thesemigrants were firmly established in Seattle, they regarded later comersas outsiders. "Rugged individualists," their motto was "Everyman for himself, and the devil take the hindmost! "
From the beginning, and as late as 1925, all commerce in Seattle revolvedaround lumber production. Vast grants of timber in the public domain hadbeen obtained from the federal government by hook or crook, and the timberbarons slashed through the mighty virgin forests with no thought for thefuture.
As the lumbermen had exploited the forests, the loggers who felled thetrees, and the sawmill hands, so many employers in Seattle took the utmostadvantage of their workers.
Soon after the 1929 stock market crash 30,000 persons in that city werejobless. Some organized the Unemployed Citizens' League, which set thepace for similar self-help groups all over the United States. Harvestingfruit and vegetable crops on a sharing basis, it set up various co-operativeenterprises, which, however, were opposed by business men, who feared thesewould cut into their profits.
On March 1, 1933, many of the League's members marched toward Olympia,the state capital, with the intention of presenting an appeal to the Governorfor reforms in relief procedure. But they were prevented from enteringthat city by several hundred "vigilantes."
• Chapter 14 : Early Champions of the Common Man
Rose Pesotta
Bread upon the Waters
CHAPTER 14
Early Champions of the Common Man
TRADITION DOMINATED organizedlabor in Seattle, which was living largely on its past. The high pointof its history seemed to be the great general strike in February, 1919,in which 60,000 men and women in 110 unions quit work. The city then hada population of 315,000. That strike was voted by the Central Labor Council,a unique body with a revolutionary background unknown in the rest of theStates.
The council was an open forum where any subject could get a hearingand a vote. Thus the general strike, as a class-war weapon, was discussedon the CLC floor as early as 1903, and the council had endorsed industrialunionism in 1909, its delegates being instructed to sponsor it on the floorof the A F of L national convention that year.
All industrial activity in Seattle was stopped by the general strikeof 1919. Technically, it was voted in support of a walk-out by the shipyardworkers of Seattle and Tacoma, 30 miles south, who wanted guarantees againstunemployment and wage-cuts following World War I. But the unions whichhad pushed the demand for a city-wide tie-up had been stirred into actionlargely by the passage of a criminal syndicalism law over the Governor'sveto; they knew well that this would be used as a legal club against outspokenunion members. The militant locals, too, had been inspired by the recentRussian Revolution; a month earlier the Metal Trades Council had set upa Soldiers, Sailors, and Workmen's Council, after the manner of the Russians,to aid demobilized war veterans in finding work.
Across the land, editorial writers and orators cried out that revolutionhad begun in Seattle. They foresaw a reign of terror and bloodshed; andperhaps some were disappointed at the lack of violence. Many of the alarmistscalled this "an IWW strike." Yet the Industrial Workers of theWorld had no part in bringing it about nor in conducting it, though someof its units actively supported it. A F of L unions were responsible forthe whole action.
A general committee of 300, designated by the Central Labor Council,in turn appointed a committee of 15, which directed all operations in thegeneral strike. Unionists without guns served as auxiliary police, andarrests even for misdemeanors were markedly fewer than in ordinary times.This strike was a mighty demonstration of working class solidarity andorderly procedure. It lasted five days.
In the CLC there were two distinct factions÷the conservative old-timerswho had urged a stoppage limited to 24 or 48 hours, and the left-wing groups,who were actuated more by emotion than by reason.
Ole Hanson, flag-waving mayor, was widely credited ou`tside of Seattlewith breaking the strike through threats of martial law. Actually however,it disintegrated and was officially called off because the committee incharge, dominated by the militants, had no concrete objectives, no practicableplan for carrying action further. That failure was a set-back from whichthe Seattle labor movement did not recover until the CIO came into thepicture.
More than 35 years before "the Century of the Common Man"was spot-lighted in the speeches of a Vise-President of the United States,and long before the CIO was thought of, the Industrial Workers of the Worldaggressively championed the cause of the great mass of humans symbolizedin that phrase.
The IWW was founded in Chicago in 1905, at a congress of some 200 radicals,who included Eugene Debs, Daniel De Leon, Mother Mary Jones, Lucy Parsons,widow of one of the Haymarket defendants, Father Thomas Hagerty, Catholicpriest and social crusader, and Bill Haywood of the Western Federationof Miners. They were concerned with organizing the nation's unskilled andmigratory labor, that hitherto neglected multitude of workers, togetherwith the skilled trades, into a mighty revolutionary union, built on industrialinstead of on craft lines.
"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common,"the IWW's flaming Preamble proclaimed. "There can be no peace so longas hunger and want are found among the millions of working people, andthe few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things in life.
"Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workersof the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and themachinery of production, and abolish the wage system.* . . . By organizingindustrially we are forming the structure of the new society within theshell of the old."
Those sentiments attracted a fearless company of zealots, men used tohardship,who went forth as organizers of the workers farthest down. Forthe most part, they headed West, to reach the throngs that labored in theagricultural fields, the orchards, the lumber woods, the metal mines, thecanneries, on big construction jobs, on merchant ships, and on the water-fronts.Some, too, went East, to line up workers in the textile mills, making spectacularforays there. Others busied themselves among the sailors on the Great Lakes,in the metal manufacturing trades, and in the rubber industry.
These organizers were not a class apart, but members who felt the urgeto line up others. They served as volunteers, being paid nothing by theorganization, and made their own living by working "at the point ofproduction," which gave them close contact with those they organized.
Traveling as did migratory workers generally÷on night freight trains,in box cars, on top, or on the rods beneath÷they had to keep on guard constantlyagainst railroad police and hijackers. Usually, however, the trainmen,unionists themselves, were friendly to any traveler who carried a "redcard." By day the IWW emissaries stopped to cook meals and wash theirlinen in some "jungle," usually alongside a railroad and on thebank of a creek or river a little way out of a town. Here, too, they wouldget some sleep in a lean-to or other shelter.
Spoken of as "Wobblies" by their enemies, supposedly to indicateinstability, they ignored the derisive implication and adopted that termas a convenient handle.
In the brief span of its life, the IWW produced men who became internationallyknown and whose names were torches of inspiration in many lands. Most ofthem paid a high price for their fame, some with their lives.
Frank Little and Wesley Everest were Iynched. Joe Hill, the poet andsong-writer, was executed. Bill Haywood, out of prison on bail while hiswar-time conviction was being appealed, was persuaded by New York. Communiststhat world revolution was just around the corner and that he was neededin it. He skipped bail and fled to Russia, only to be relegated to thesidelines, and to die there a broken man.
Richard Ford and William Suhr spent years in prison, solely becauseof speeches, alleged to have incited a killing committed in the courseof a riot among terribly exploited workers in the California hop fields.Carlo Tresca, many times jailed in strikes and often in danger of death,survived to the age of sixty-four; then, after long anti-Fascist activity,he was assassinated in 1943 in the New York City dim-out. Ironically, hedid not live to see the downfall of Mussolini, which came only six monthslater.
The IWW was much more of a revolutionary organization than a labor union÷andfrankly so. Its Preamble appeared in every issue of its various newspapers,pamphlets, and other publications, and its literature had the great virtueof simplicity.
Open forums in the Wobbly halls, scattered through cities and townsfrom coast to coast, helped to make clear to new members what the organizationwas fighting for. And it had one educational center where organizers weretrained÷the Work Peoples' College in Duluth. The ordinary Wobbly was uneducated,except for what he had learned by reading IWW literature or listening tospeeches by its organizers. But he had a feeling that something was comingto him in life. Ignored by the big craft labor unions, he clung to theIWW, the "One Big Union," as his only protection. Its pamphletsand books and newspapers in various languages explained in simple wordsthe value of industrial unionism. The rank-and-file had a clear exampleof craft union weakness when, for instance, in railroad strikes, wherethe shopmen walked out because of deep grievances the enginemen, firemen,and trainmen kept on working and involuntarily helped break the strikeof their own brothers.
The "little red song book" was the Wobbly's Bible, and everyIWW hall rang out with lusty male voices singing Hallelujah, I'm a Bum,which satirically glorified the lot of the migratory worker; Casey Jones,an IWW version; The Red Flag; Workingmen, Unite! and a host of others.
It was characteristic of IWW meetings that after the last speech hadended and the applause had died down, the audience would break up intocircles, to continue discussing the subject, and later each circle wouldsing its favorite song. Gradually the circles would merge, and finallyeach man present, his arms over another's shoulders, would join in JoeHill's best-known ballad, The Preacher and the Slave, a take-off on thestreet-corner revival hymn, In the Sweet Bye and Bye:
Long-haired preachers come out every night, Try to tell you what's wrongand what's right; When you ask them for something to eat They will answerwith voices so sweet:
Chorus:
You will eat, bye and bye In that glorious land above the sky; Workand pray, live on hay, You'll get pie in the sky when you die.
Immediately after the Seattle general strike a state-wide drive againstlabor radicals was begun, with the IWW as principal target. The new criminalsyndicalism law was brought into play, and many Wobblies were sent to prisonsolely for membership, on the testimony of stool-pigeons who had joinedthe organization, and who volunteered "admissions" of acts ofarson and sabotage. Similar prosecutions followed in Oregon and California.
These drives were designed to corral any articulate IWW organizers whomight have sprung up since the imprisoning of 225 of its leaders. convictedin three big trials in Illinois, Kansas, and California, because of theiropposition to the United States entering World War I.
From the beginning of their activities in the Northwest, the Wobblieswere hated, feared, and bitterly opposed by the big industrial interestsin Seattle and the surrounding country. All that opposition was a challengeto them. They fought courageously and doggedly to change the conditionof the migratory workers. They had forced wages up in the agriculturaland construction fields. But it was in the lumber woods that they madetheir presence felt most.
Pay rates in the logging camps were low, hours long (a work-day of 11or 12 hours was common), compensation for physical injuries non-existent.A man might be crippled by a falling tree, and then no longer could makea living. Bathing and laundry facilities were generally absent from thecamps and the timber-workers had to sleep in vermin-ridden bunks. Oftenthe food was monotonous and poorly cooked.
These men were of varying nationalities, a considerable percentage havingScandinavian parentage and some being French-Canadian, but the bulk ofthem were American-born. They were "womanless, homeless, and voteless."The policy of the employers generally was to hire unmarried men, preferablythose with itching feet, who would not stay long on a job. Migration wasencouraged by the foremen, who worked their men until they were too fatiguedto continue; then others would be brought in to replace them.
In 1917 the IWW staged a vast strike in the Northwest lumber woods,which cut the work-day to eight hours and forced employers to put in decentsleeping quarters and sanitary facilities. That strike was poison to thetimber barons because it reduced their profits at a time when they hada chance to make huge war fortunes. They dealt largely with spruce neededfor Army airplanes, and the price of spruce had skyrocketed.
The Wobblies stood for direct action, and among their most effectivetactics were the slow-down strike and the strike-on-the-job. The slow-downwas a means of giving "little work for little pay," in contrastto the Samuel Gompers conception of "A fair day's work for a fairday's pay."
Peculiar to the IWW, the strike-on-the-job was used to excellent effectin the 1911 conflict in the lumber woods. After a few weeks many of thestriking Wobblies had run out of money. To get a stake, groups of the strikerstook jobs at lumber camps scattered through Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.They would work five days on an 11- or 12-hour basis. On the sixth day,at the end of eight hours, one of them would blow a whistle. All of hisgang would instantly quit work, draw their pay, and move on to anothercamp, where they would repeat the process. This went on until the employersin despair conceded the eight-hour day to get production.
In retaliation, two Wobbly halls in Centralia, a timber-shipping town90 miles south of Seattle, were raided and wrecked, one in 1918 by thetail-end of a Red Cross parade and the other on Armistice Day, 1919, byparading American Legionnaires. Warned that the second raid was coming,the IWW's appealed to the police for protection, got no satisfaction, andso prepared to defend their headquarters.
Gun-fire met the marchers as they broke down the union hall doors, andfour Legionnaires were killed in the fighting which followed. Posses quicklyhunted down and jailed dozens of IWW members. After dark, Wesley Everest,war veteran and one of the hall's defenders, was handed over to a partyof local merchants, who emasculated him with a razor, hanged him from ariver bridge, and shot his body full of holes.
No one was punished for that Iynching, but seven IWW's were convictedof conspiracy to commit murder and were sentenced to 25 to 40 years inprison. Another, found insane by a jury, was held a few months in an asylum,and then was sent to join the others in the penitentiary.
The heyday of the IWW was a romantic period, ending with its ultimateaims÷industrial solidarity the world over and the social revolution÷stillroseate dreams. In its early stages the Russian revolution inspired theWobblies, but they were soon disheartened by ensuing developments in Russia÷thecounter-revolution, supported by that nation's former Allies; the terrorwhich inevitably followed; the one-party dictatorship; denial of civilliberties and of self-organization to working people.
Various forces, both external and internal, contributed to the disintegrationof the Industrial Workers of the World÷ideological differences over theRussian situation, war trials, which left the organization leaderless,mass deportations, tarring and feathering off organizers, lynchings, jailingsunder the criminal syndicalism laws, and postwar unemployment, which invariablycomes with demobilization.
But apart from these elements, the IWW was marked for failure becauseof fundamental weaknesses in tactics. Loosely organized, it never got atangible hold on its membership; and contemptuous of the business world'smethods, it had no signed contracts. Thus the gains it made through hard-foughtstrikes were necessarily only temporary. Its attitude toward the future,though idealistic, was visionary and not practical.
In justice be it said, however, that this courageous fighting organizationserved as a trail blazer for the CIO. The mistakes made by the IWW weremany, and the Committee for Industrial Organization learned from it whatpitfalls to avoid. Advantages won by the CIO for the workers in the massproduction, migratory, lumber, agricultural, and unskilled fields, havebeen duly signed and sealed in air-. tight contracts. Moreover, the CIOappeared at a much more favorable time. It utilized the benefits of thepro-labor legislation enacted under the New Deal, while the IWW had noaid from law-makers.
To me, in 1935, Seattle was a union ghost town. Since 1919 labor therehad moved like a sleep-walker. There had been strikes in the interim, yes,but, with the exception of the longshoremen's walkout in 1934, usuallyto little effect. Some had run on for months, even years, finally peteringout like a stream of water flowing across desert sands. One strike of motion-pictureoperators continued for 13 years. It was settled during my stay.
Local technique puzzled me. A union would put a single picket with abanner, "This place is on strike," in front of a shop. Aftera few days, he would disappear. When I had seen this happen several times,I stepped into the office of one of the small unions, and asked if a certainshoe store strike had been settled.
"No," said the secretary, "we're out of money, so wecouldn't pay the picket any longer." When the union was flush, itwould assign another picket to duty.
Union officers, quartered in the Labor Temple, were largely of the typeportrayed by cartoonists in the capitalist press÷chair-warmers and cigar-smokers.I learned that rank-and-file members were not encouraged to hang aroundthe union offices. At meetings of locals the officers would take up routinematters÷reading of the local's minutes, CLC minutes, the local's correspondence,then adjournment. Dull proceedings, no new faces.
The only really animated labor scene in the Temple (apart from the gatheringsof our own girls, who went on strike a little later and enlivened the wholebuilding) was to be found in the Central Labor Council meetings, whichstill furnished an arena for verbal bouts and political contests. I rememberparticularly one stormy session there÷a fresh outbreak of an old jurisdictionalwrangle. After many years the Brewery Workers' Union, industrial in form,had succeeded in affiliating with the CLC. Through all that time the Teamsters'Union had claimed the brewery wagon drivers, and got away with it.
On the night that the brewery union delegates were seated, they toldhow glad all their members were over making this new alliance, and promisedto bring plenty of beer for everybody to the next CLC meeting.
But that celebration never took place. Dave Beck, president of the SeattleTeamsters' Joint Council, real boss of the CLC, and heir apparent to DanTobin, head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, had not beenpresent when the brewery workers' delegation first appeared. As soon ashe heard what had happened, he put his machine into motion.
At the next CLC session I sat in the front row with our delegates. Whenthe secretary, calling the roll, reached the name of a brewery union man,Beck got up quickly from among the teamsters and objected loudly to thebrewery workers' delegates being seated, on the ground that theirs wasa dual union.
Almost instantly a free-for-all fight started. No free beer flowed thatnight, but blood flowed later, as an outcome of that clash. Soon the Teamsters'Union declared the Northwest Brewing Company unfair, and called a strikein its plant. The Northwest company had an agreement with the Brewery Workers'Union, which Beck did not recognize as a legitimate union contract.
Violent battles broke out between the beer-wagon drivers in the breweryunion and the Teamsters' Union pickets. To protect the Northwest company'semployes, thugs who had been "on guard" at the factories wewere picketing were transferred there. Gun fights ensued, and four teamsterswere killed. The dressmakers' local being affiliated with the CLC, I wentwith delegations to lay wreaths on their coffins. A deputized guard namedHiatt, who had been rough with our pickets, got a 10-year sentence as anaccessory in one of those killings.
* In its original form, that Preamble called for the eventual comingtogether of all toilers on the political as well as on the industrial field,to "take and hold that which they produce by their labor...."Subsequently the political reference was dropped. Harrison Gray Otis, labor-hatingeditor of the Los Angeles Times, is said to have originated this label.
• Chapter 15 : Employers Double as Vigilantes